The Formosa Fraud

By Graham Earnshaw

More than 300 years ago, Taiwan was a controversial topic in London, thanks to a stupendous fraud perpetrated by a Frenchman claiming to have been born there. He made up an entire fantasy for the island with a fake history, a fake language and long list of outrageous claims that made his book, A Description of Formosa, a publishing sensation in

• Language: English
• Publisher: Earnshaw Books Ltd
• Release date: Feb 28, 2022
• ISBN: 9789888422135

Graham Earnshaw

Graham Earnshaw is a writer and publisher who has long lived in the China world. He has written and published a number of books, including On Your Own in China (1984), Tales of Old Shanghai (2008) and an account of his continuing walk across China, The Great Walk of China (2010). His translation of the Jin Yong kung fu novel The Book and The Sword was published by Oxford University Press in 2004. 

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Formosa_Fraud-Cover.jpg

The Formosa Fraud

By Graham Earnshaw

ISBN-13: 978-988-8422-12-8

© 2021 Graham Earnshaw

HISTORY / Asia / Formosa

EB079

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in material form, by any means, whether graphic, electronic, mechanical or other, including photocopying or information storage, in whole or in part. May not be used to prepare other publications without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information contact [e-mail]

Published by Earnshaw Books Ltd. (Hong Kong)

Psalmanazar’s semi-fantasy map of Formosa and environs

Foreword

Fakery is a part of life. Telling one hundred percent of the truth one hundred percent of the time is just not possible for anyone, nor advisable.

The truth about dishonesty is that most of it is modest in nature—simple lies of omission, slight obfuscations, the dressing up of inconvenient facts, putting a somewhat generous spin on unfortunate circumstances. There would be few CVs that have ever been sent out that are totally and completely honest in terms of the experience and qualifications and capabilities listed. Marketing and public relations are two huge professions that are wholly dedicated to putting lipstick on reality—and the astute consumer of products and information is, on one level or another, in on that secret.

But fakery in information is taking on a new significance these days. Social media, which we have all come to depend on to some extent, is flooded with fake news, something that played an important, maybe even decisive, role in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. The irresistible pull of marketing gravity sucks in the mainstream media as well, unwillingly or all-too-willingly. And then there are the accusations that the same media are themselves pushing fake news.

As a former journalist and someone who deals every day with the shadowy dividing line between fact and spin, reality and hype, lies and the truth, the story of George Psalmanazar was particularly appealing because it is not simply a story of the past. It has a relevance to today, as we try to make sense of the flood of information coming at us unfiltered through our myriad devices, or worse, filtered by an algorithm optimized for click-throughs instead of the public good.

The sense of general unreliability of information, of individuals being left to make up their own minds as to the veracity or fakeness of what they are told would have been as true for people in London in the early eighteenth century who heard the stories of Formosa told by George Psalmanazar as for viewers of various YouTube channels today. The difference is that today, we have the means, if we choose to use them, of verifying information in various ways. In 1704 in London, there was no Google, no fact-checking websites and no easy way for anyone to call Psalmanazar on any details of his story. And he used that fact, the inaccessibility of the source material, to his advantage. But in many cases today, the existence of evidence to the contrary hardly slows down the wildly implausible, to say nothing of the merely mistaken, just as the authorities of the days—Jesuit priests who had lived many years in China—were not necessarily believed when they called Psalmanazar out on details of his fantasy.

There are many parallels to situations and events in modern times, but the experience of James Frey seems particularly apposite. Frey is an American writer whose book A Million Little Pieces was published in 2003 as a memoir. It includes sometimes harrowing stories of his years growing up, and even Oprah Winfrey, who unlike the rest of us is surrounded by specialists who professionally manage her life, bought into it. Frey was eventually exposed, and admitted that many episodes in the book were either exaggerated or plain made up. But in an interview in 2006, Frey defended his work, saying that all memoirs change some details for literary effect. Oprah also took the view, in part, that regardless of the issues, Frey’s story had been inspirational for her viewers… a claim that, one should note, is useful in its in-built resistance to verification.

There are perhaps two common themes that can be discerned in a comparison of the many examples of fake news today and the story of George Psalmanazar. One is a determination on the part of the faker to double down in the face of objections. Do not admit the lie, instead build on it. Be categorical. Cast doubt on the objector, and accuse them fakery too. The second theme is a desire on the part of the audience to believe the lie. Just like Oprah with Frey, English readers including the Bishop of London saw a fantastic story in Psalmanazar story something that was useful to them.

With Psalmanazar’s tales of riches and exoticism in a corner of far-off Asia, there was a ready audience in the early eighteenth century ready and primed to lap it up, embracing the Formosa fantasy for their own reasons regardless of, even in the face of, obvious flaws to the story. The link between this story and how information flows and audiences deal with it in the early twenty-first century is obvious.

Many people have told a white lie to get their first job, to get on that crucial first rung of the ladder. There is an English saying that First you get on, then you get honest. Which says much the same thing – fake it if need be until you are in a position to be real. Psalmanazar just took the same idea and built it out with a creativity that in some ways matches J.R.R. Tolkein’s Middle Earth.

This is not in any way a defence of fakery or of Psalmanazar, but simply a recognition of the universality of the psychology involved. Social media in the early twenty-first century has provided an opportunity for doing exactly the kind of thing that Psalmanazar did – the creation of an entire castle in the air. The silo-ed and discrete nature of online social media communities recreates in a way the geographical distances and difficulties of travel that made it possible for Psalmanazar to pull the wool over the eyes of Londoners all those years ago.

Graham Earnshaw

Part I

The

Fraud

1. Origins

Taiwan is the topic on everyone’s lips. What’s going on there? Who does the island rightfully belong to? How important is the influence of the West? What is the real culture of the island’s residents? The debate rages.

Is this the early twenty-first century? No, it’s London more than three hundred years ago, at the beginning of the eighteenth century.

In 1704, a man appeared in England with the most extraordinary stories about Taiwan, or Formosa as it was then called. Eighteen-thousand boys are killed every year as part of Formosan religious ceremonies, the island is a major producer of gold and silver and Catholic priests are causing trouble there.

He said his name was George Psalmanazar, and his information about Formosa—it’s culture, history, society and economy—absolutely captivated the English reading public. He published a book on the topic which went into a second edition, he gave speeches, he was fêted by the Bishop of London, he went to Oxford to teach Formosan. There was just one problem with the situation - his whole story was fake.

George Psalmanazar knew nothing of Formosa, had never been anywhere closer to it than Avignon in the south of France. And yet with enormous skill and creativity, he created an entire world around the idea of Formosa, including a fake language, a fake religion and a fake history.

The choice of Formosa for this story is somewhat serendipitous, but Formosa was then, and to an extent remains today, a place in exotic East Asia that is both separate and not separate, a place that is both known and also not fully understood. It is, most importantly, an island, and it was that fact that George Psalmanazar used as the basis of his web of deceit.

But to what purpose?

George Psalmanazar was born somewhere around the year 1679, and while the exact date is not known, it was certainly not with that name. 

He became famous for pretending to be a Formosan, a fabrication which for a time made him a celebrity in London, but his Memoirs, published the year after his death in 1764, indicate that he was born in southern France, for he had long since given up the fiction that he was a native of that island off the coast of China which today is called Taiwan.

He says in the Memoirs that his parents were Roman Catholics, but gives no further information about them, not even their names. An advertisement to the first edition of his Memoirs quotes from a clergyman and long-time acquaintance of his, who said that:

He was a Frenchman. His pronunciation had a spice of the Gascoin accent, and in that provincial dialect, he was so masterly, that none but those born in the country could equal, none though born there could excel him.

It further suggests that the Languedoc region of southern France was his place of birth. 

But Psalmanazar makes few references in his Memoirs to his very early years, beyond the suggestion that his family was poor, that his father left when he was less than five years old to live in what is today southern Germany, and that he was considered as a child to be a gifted student. 

His delight in keeping his origins a secret was part of a lifelong game which far outlasted the Formosan scam. Here is an excerpt from his Memoirs showing how hard he worked throughout his life at the artifice by masking his accent and jumbling together phrases and pronunciations to make it impossible for anyone to figure out his origins. He clearly relished ever minute of it.

My idiom and pronunciation were so mixed and blended, and I may say designedly so, by the many languages I had learned, and nations I had been conversant with, that it was impossible for the most curious judge to discover in it any thing like an uniform likeness to any other European one they knew of. 

The truth was, he added, I knew enough of all of them to blend my discourse more or less with any of them, as either to put people upon the wrong scent, whilst I kept every one from getting into the right one; for I can safely say that I never met with, nor heard of any one, that ever guessed right, or any thing near it, with respect to my native country. 

At six, he attended a school run by two Franciscan monks and learned Latin from them, and then attended a Jesuit college, where he studied the Humanities, rhetoric and philosophy. He speaks proudly in the Memoirs of his early facility for learning languages, not surprising for someone who would go on to create one (or to at least to fake it up to some reasonable level of depth and complexity in terms of grammar and vocabulary). After that he went to study philosophy and theology in a Dominican university in the same region of France, and was, he says, by far the youngest of the pupils, some of whom were twice my age, and none by many years so young as I.

At sixteen, he moved on to Avignon where he says he continued his studies and started working as a tutor, teaching young gentlemen some of what he had learned of Latin, philosophy and theology. But he says that his attractive appearance caused him trouble. The mother of two boys he was tutoring made sexual advances to him, and dismissed him when he did not respond in the desired way.

As she was a sprightly lady, and her spouse somewhat heavy, though not old, I soon found by her behaviour, and her parting beds with him soon after my coming, that she would have been better pleased I had transferred my care from them to her; and as I was naturally fond of ingratiating myself with the sex, I indulged her in all her little foibles, but without having the least design of going farther than a bare complaisance, in order to gain her esteem and admiration, rather than her affection.

His decision not to respond to her overtures, he said, was the result of my natural sheepish bashfulness, and unexperienced youth rather than virtue. After six months he was dismissed.

He returned to Avignon, down and out, and explained his ragged appearance to people by saying he was a sufferer for religion for too great attachment to the church. A first tentative subterfuge.

He decided to return home, and that triggered his next, more elaborate, scam. To help convince people to give him money along the way, he stole a cloak and staff and forged a certificate stating that he was a student in theology, of Irish extract on a pilgrimage to Rome. He went first to see his mother and then set off north to see his father, who encouraged Psalmanazar to visit other parts of Germany and the Netherlands before he returned to France. By now, he had given up the Irish identity because it was too easy for people to call him on the ruse – there were people on the road who could tell the difference between a real and a fake Irishman. He therefore changed his story and chose for himself a new place of origin that virtually no one in Europe could question. He became Japanese.

He made himself a new certificate of identity, and invented an alphabet and various words of a language that he hoped would be mistaken for Japanese. He knew that Hebrew was written from right to left, so he deduced that other Eastern languages would follow suit. He came up with twenty letters with shapes and pronunciations that drew on Greek and Hebrew letters for inspiration.

To support his story, he also created, he says in the Memoirs, many other particulars equally difficult, such as a considerable piece of a new language and grammar, a new division of the year into twenty months, a new religion, &c. and all out of my own head.

In fact it was ten months; his memory of the details of his own invention had faded over the years. Unwell and also destitute, he was dragooned into a military unit near Bonn, using his new Japanese persona, then shifted to another regiment in Cologne, when for the first time he used the name Psalmanazar. He says in his Memoirs that he took the name from the Bible; Shalmaneser was a king of Assyria who held the Israelites captive. He later changed the spelling, adding an initial P, he said, to make it more exotic.

He also further changed his story, saying he was in fact from the island of Formosa, now called Taiwan, which he said was politically and culturally subservient to Japan.

Now in his early twenties, Psalmanazar changed regiments again, this time enlisting in a unit at Sluys, Holland, where he met a Scottish chaplain named Alexander Innes who quickly saw through Psalmanazar’s fraud.

His stratagem, Psalmanazar wrote in his Memoirs, "was to make me translate a passage of Cicero de natura deorum¹ of some length, into my (pretended) Formosan language, and give it to him in writing; and this I easily did ... But, after he had made me construe it, and desired me to write another version of it on another paper, his proposal, and the manner of his exacting it, threw me into such visible confusion, having had so little time to excogitate the first, and less to commit it to memory, that there were not above one half of the words in the second that were in the first."

Innes told him, with a wink, that he ought to take care to be better provided for the future.

Innes in other words, also saw an opportunity in the situation, and once he was sure that Psalmanazar had the wit to sustain the fraud, he wrote to the Bishop of London introducing this extraordinary pagan from a far-off land whom he had baptized into the Church of England. Psalmanazar, broke and tired of the military life, was happy to play along, and Innes obtained for him an invitation to go to England. Innes, for his part, received a personal commendation from the Bishop of London, Henry Compton.

They sailed for England. Psalmanazar wrote that he was so worried during the trip across the Channel about whether he could maintain the charade that he paid little attention to a fierce storm that threatened the ship to such an extent that many of the passengers, Innes among them, took to a long boat just in case the ship foundered.

But once they had landed at Harwich and Innes took him to celebrity London, the advantages of the scam started to become clear.

---

1 Cicero’s Nature of the Gods

2. Celebrity

He and Innes moved into lodgings on Pall Mall and Innes started introducing him round. Psalmanazar, masquerading as a Formosa pagan newly escaped from the Jesuits and welcomed into the Church of England, became a celebrity. Innes, meanwhile, was engaging, Psalmanazar said, in notorious and barefaced immoralities.

The truth is, he had an almost insurmountable propensity to wine and women, and when fraught with the former, fell immoderately foul on the latter, whether maids or married.

Psalmanazar would by this time have got over his youthful bashfulness and perhaps, who knows, took advantage of the curiosity of the local ladies towards a Formosan. 

Innes introduced him to the Bishop of London, and Psalmanazar started circulating in London society. Meanwhile, he was writing his description of Formosa, building on the initial stories he had weaved on the road and embellished for Innes. He wrote it, he said in the Preface, mostly in Latin.

Within a year of his arrival in England, Psalmanazar was famous. In 1704, he completed his book An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa and it was published in London. He dedicated the book to Bishop Compton, with whom he had shared early drafts of his Formosan materials, including a translation of the Lord’s Prayer and the Ten Commandments into Psalmanazar’s fake Formosan script, a table of the Formosan alphabet, and drawings of the clothing of the Formosans, which appeared in the book as published.

The first edition was an instant success, but also raised the eyebrows of detractors who had already raised a range of objections to Psalmanazar’s story in various meetings.

The pinnacle of Psalmanazar’s credibility was reached when he appeared, prior to the publication of his book, before the Royal Society, an organization created in 1660 to promote scientific and cultural enquiries of all kinds, which at the time of Psalmanazar’s brief celebrity was headed by Sir Isaac Newton.

He spoke to members of the society on the topic of Formosa on February 2, 1704, debating against a French Jesuit priest, Father Jean de Fontenay, who had lived in China for fourteen years, before returning to Europe in 1702. He at least had had contact with other Jesuit priests who had spent some time in Formosa.

Psalmanazar said in the preface to the first edition that he defeated Fontenay’s argument that Formosa was a tributary of China rather than of Japan, and dismissed many of the Jesuit priest’s other assertions on the simple basis that they came from a Jesuit. He added that this was the first of three debates or discussions he had with Fontenay.

Psalmanazar does refer in his preface to the island of Tyowan, which is what he says Fortenay called Formosa. Psalmanazar neatly muddies the waters by saying that although Tyowan existed, it was another island somewhat remote and distinct from ours, and is now a colony belonging to the beforemention’d Dutch.

In the Second Preface, prepared and published in 1705, Psalmanazar, also gives an account of a meeting with astronomer and mathematician Edmond Halley which is worth quoting in full:

"’Tis about a Year since I had the honour